The pursuit of happiness, and other sobering thoughts

Love him or hate him, George F. Will has a thoughtful (and more often than not, a trenchant) opinion on every aspect of American social and political life, especially on the state of American public philosophy and on the state of the nation's civility. The subtext of his generation of public philosophical pronouncements (via essays and editorials) has always been: "Hey, if you look at what we do (and not at what we say), we are not quite the people we ought to be (or thought we were), now are we?" To many people, like me, Will's brand of "slippery" conservatism used to "grate on my nerves:" like the scratching of chalk on a blackboard. I would much prefer a clearer target on which to vent when the need arises. But then again, I think that is just the kind of reaction Will has always sought to produce and would be proudest of. Maybe it's a measure of getting old, or an index of how fragmented our culture has finally become, or worse, of how poor editorial and opinion writing has become, but more and more I am becoming worried that I am beginning to agree with and think like, Will, and indeed rely on his always sage commentary as a last resort to keeping my dying brain alive. As he notes in the introduction to this collection, essays can only lay out the contours of public philosophy. They are like vectors that point back to the underlying or more latent values and principles upon which a nation's character rest. It is not, nor can it "ever be" those values, principles or that national character. In short, public philosophers are only messengers; and no matter what they say, they are not the message: ultimately what the people do is the message. The messages of these essays on the state of the nation during the late 70s and early 80s have suddenly become precious cultural heirlooms. They are pronouncements about the state of our nation at a time when things were already "going bad," but even so, then they were at least still recognizably coherent. Today, it seems that our fragmentation has no discernable outlines, no rhyme or reason. Somehow, today in the midst of emotional-based divisions, public scandals, elite deviance, disingenuous elected officials, the nation has begun to lose any sense of wholeness: its every group for himself. These "philosophical meditations" as the author calls them, attempt to examine, to summon up and recall the sacred principles upon which the nation was built, and in doing so, Will tries to restore a sense of wholeness to a rapidly fragmenting polity. These essays show us, and the world, that even when sausage is being made in the kitchen of a still fledgling democracy, there is a larger collective meaning and national whole. I believe that when we have to look back on the 60s, 70s, and 80s as the good old days, then our nation is in trouble: Read' em and weep. Five stars.

This is by far the best collection of George Will's work available. Will covers topics ranging from the Will children to Watergate, from marijuana to manners. For anyone like myself who was born too late to understand the 1970's, this book is a great way to gain insight into the culture and politics of that decade. As always, Will's columns are a joy to read. They provide an incisive wit and an unflappable sense of absurdity.